Zadara Employs Intel Technologies and Building Blocks

Zadara Storage Ltd, a provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service (STaaS), is using Intel Developer Forum to showcase the latest version of its Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) featuring numerous Intel technologies and building blocks.

After decades of enterprise and service provider IT leaders putting up with costly and inelastic storage solutions that took months to deploy and years of CapEx and depreciation, the VPSA provides the full breadth of enterprise storage capabilities, yet in an as-a-service, on-demand, elastic, cost-effective and multi-tenant fashion. By developing software-defined storage (SDS) that runs on top of commodity hardware – which includes Xeon processors with Intel Virtualization technology, Intel NICs with Intel-pioneered SR-IOV, and Intel SSDs – Zadara is able to offer a flexible, enterprise-grade, as-a-service solution while delivering cost savings on day one and every day thereafter.

Zadara is introducing capabilities including sophisticated snapshots, remote replication, multi-zone HA, encryption, in-storage Docker containers, and backup to object storage utilize Intel architecture capabilities. For example, multi-core Intel Xeon processors enable a granular and affordable multi-tenancy, while SR-IOV ensures a QoS which delivers performance over time regardless of the activities of other tenants (also known as the ‘noisy neighbor’ effet). In another innovation, high-durability yet cost-effective SSDs boost performance by acting as a write cache. The end-result is an elastic, attractively priced service that offers the performance and features of more expensive systems.

“We have taken a close look at the TCO of the Zadara Storage VPSA service,” said Randy Kerns, senior strategist and analyst, the Evaluator Group, Inc.. “The cost savings of VPSA versus the traditional purchase-maintain-refresh cycle are significant and even improve over time. This is partly thanks to the intelligent use of standard, mass-produced hardware.“

“Intel has for decades been executing on a vision of providing products and underlying technologies that enable innovative products that improve the IT experience,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO and co-founder, Zadara. “By relying upon a number of their innovations, we were able to bring to market in a relatively short time a disruptive, no-compromise enterprise storage product that is compatible with traditional storage, yet exceeds it in terms of capabilities, flexibility and cost.“

“Enterprise storage is experiencing a period of great transformation with the adoption of new storage orchestration software and non-volatile memory technologies,” said Bev Crair, VP, DCG storage group, Intel Corporation. “Solutions like those demonstrated by Zadara Storage are testaments to the speed of innovation within the storage arena and the storage ecosystem’s progress in the delivery of software defined infrastructure.“

Zadara Storage demonstrated the VPSA at IDF’15.